Elektra

Movie Review

Elektra is a superhero action movie without much action in it. I’m not even sure it’s about Elektra. I get what they were going for here. Director Rob Bowman is trying to take the comic book movie genre somewhere a little bit new. He’s trying for a primarily drama motivated film punctuated by little bits of action. He fails. Instead, Elektra is a film for people who might like watching scene after scene of Jennifer Garner sleeping. After awhile, I started to think that it was a good suggestion, and nearly nodded off myself.

Elektra is a superhero action movie without much action in it. I’m not even sure it’s about Elektra. I get what they were going for here. Director Rob Bowman is trying to take the comic book movie genre somewhere a little bit new. He’s trying for a primarily drama motivated film punctuated by little bits of action. He fails. Instead, Elektra is a film for people who might like watching scene after scene of Jennifer Garner sleeping. After awhile, I started to think that it was a good suggestion, and nearly nodded off myself.

The much touted Miss Garner reprises the role she originated in Daredevil, this time with her own completely separate spin-off in Elektra. She’s dropped the Natchios from her name, and been resurrected from the dead. Other than a few millisecond flashback scenes in which the movie alludes to her resurrection, any connection between the mediocre Daredevil film and this one is absent. I guess they wanted to stay away from the character’s dubious cinematic roots, but it is Daredevil that ought to be ashamed of any association.

This movie finds a red-clad Elektra as an assassin for hire. She stalks people for pay, until she’s assigned to kill an innocent father and daughter. First though, she must spend a few sleepy days hanging out at a lakeside mansion, sleeping, swimming, and feeding her OCD. Then she gets around to not killing the father and daughter, only to discover they’re hunted by a group of ninjas known as “The Hand”. Apparently, there is a good “Hand” and a bad “Hand”, so she takes them to the good one for protection. I kept expecting a cameo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “Foot”, but sadly that doesn’t happen.

The Ninjas “The Hand” throws at her seem to die pretty easily, having spent all their time working on marksmanship and very little practicing hand to hand combat. So Elektra takes it easy some more and we start to get the sense that this movie isn’t really about her, but the aforementioned father and his daughter Abby who hog up her screen time as their secret is uncovered. The film might well have been renamed “Abby” or perhaps “Elektra and Abby” would have been appropriate. By the end they’ve formed an interminably cute Batman and Robin like duo. Time spent establishing their relationship through girlish giggling made me physically sick.

Elektra is a massively boring disaster punctuated by bad dialogue and bad directing. The script is a mess and only seems to make sense when nothing interesting is happening. Luckily for them, that’s a good portion of the film. Just once I’d like to see a movie where characters part and give each other a forwarding address. Alas, as if to add insult to my already mountainous injuries, Elektra ends the film by declaring “don’t worry, we’ll find each other”… or something like that. It’s not like I wrote it down. I was too busy running out of the theater.